Hollywood Suddenly Focuses On The `60s Civil Rights Struggles

HOLLYWOOD — Less than a three-hour drive apart on a Mississippi highway, two movie companies are poking their cameras into the uncomfortable past.

``Mississippi Burning`` is a fictionalized account of the murders of three civil rights workers in the summer of 1964.

``Heart of Dixie,`` set in 1957, observes the struggle for integration through the eyes of a college woman who was brought up to be a Southern lady.

A third film, ``Mississippi Summer,`` being developed at Warner Brothers, ends with the murders that trigger ``Mississippi Burning.``

And Universal Pictures and Jessica Lange are developing ``The Stick Wife,`` from a play by Darrah Cloud. Lange will play the wife of a member of the Ku Klux Klan who took part in the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham, Ala., in which four black girls were killed.

All of this is after two decades in which films largely ignored the civil rights movement.

Tova Laiter, a producer who carried her idea for ``Mississippi Summer``

from studio to studio in 1986, said, ``For a year I got either total rejection or patronizing responses from the studios.``

``Mississippi Summer`` tells the story of the friendship between Michael Schwerner, a white social worker from New York, and James Chaney, a black student from Mississippi, who were murdered and dumped into an earthen dam 24 years ago, along with another New Yorker, Andrew Goodman, a white college student who had been in Mississippi only one day when he was killed.

``Mississippi Burning,`` which begins with the murder of three unnamed activists, tells the story of two FBI agents (Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe)

who investigate the crime. ``Burning`` is being directed by Alan Parker, the director of ``Midnight Express`` and ``Fame.``

``When the Vietnam War ended, (columnist) Russell Baker suggested we should put the war in the attic like Mother`s wedding dress and wait 10 or 15 years,`` said Fred Zollo, producer of ``Mississippi Burning.``

``You need time to let the immediate emotion and horror die down. But the window onto civil rights is now open. People have gone up to the attic.``

Why have they gone to the attic at this particular moment? Nearly everyone compares the current interest in serious issues of the `60s to the need that started a few years ago to come to terms with the Vietnam War.

That need resulted in ``Platoon,`` ``Full Metal Jacket,`` ``Hamburger Hill,`` and ``Good Morning, Vietnam,`` and ``Casualties of War,`` which will be released soon.

There is a feeling that racial issues are back in the forefront because racial antagonism is increasing.

Stanley Weiser, who wrote the script for ``Mississippi Summer,`` pointed to the visibility of Jesse Jackson`s run for the Democratic presidential nomination and the tension from racial incidents such as the attack on three black men by young whites in the Howard Beach area of New York City.

Zollo also mentions the Howard Beach incident and a protest against racial harassment last month by more than 100 minority students at the University of Massachusetts.

According to Sean Daniel, president of production at Universal Pictures,

``These subjects are both reflections of a time past and a time quite clearly immediately upon us; the problems have not diminished.``

``I do feel a springlike ferment in the air,`` said Sidney Lumet, who just has finished directing ``Running on Empty,`` in which characters played by Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch have been living in hiding since they blew up a napalm laboratory 18 years earlier.

The movie, to be released by Lorimar in August, deals with the effect of their several changes of identity on their son, who is played by River Phoenix.

Naomi Foner, the writer of ``Running on Empty,`` described her characters as ``representing the spirit of the `60s, somewhat like the Berrigans.``

``True Believer,`` another film that uses an archetype from the `60s as a backdrop, was shooting in Oakland, Calif., a few weeks ago. James Woods stars as a former civil liberties lawyer who has moved cynically on to defending drug dealers. He is redeemed by representing an Asian who may have been framed for murder.

And in ``Everybody`s All-American,`` a Taylor Hackford movie shooting in Louisiana, a subplot examines changes in racial relations in the South from the mid-`50s to 1980.

A black character played by Carl Lumbly gets involved in the civil rights movement and eventually runs for the state legislature.

This sudden outpouring simply may be ``that the `80s are looking back at the `60s just like the `70s looked back at the `50s,`` said Mike Medavoy, head of production at Orion, the company that distributed ``Platoon.`` Both

``Mississipi Burning`` and ``Heart of Dixie`` are Orion movies.

``The scripts came to us, and we liked them,`` Medavoy said. ``We didn`t go out and measure the public.``